Interesting read! My oversimplification of the paper: give yourself real-life exposure to situations you fear in dreams. (You'll probably respond well IRL, and

Interesting read! My oversimplification of the paper: give yourself real-life exposure to situations you fear in dreams. (You'll probably respond well IRL, and start to break down your anxiety.) Some key quotes “… dreaming results in the mental generation of situations where we should behave unanxiously, or without avoidance … the function of dreams is to highlight erroneous fear responses … anxieties are the over generalisation of the fear response, stemming from a real fear memory, resulting in unnecessarily avoidant behaviour. These are what dreams bring attention to.” “in my own therapy, where I started to use [dreams] to identify which fear I needed to expose myself to next, I found that, as one dampens the highlighted fear in real life, in-dream behaviour becomes increasingly un-avoidant (i.e., in line with what the situation demands). … This process continues until the fear is no longer present, at which point dreams highlighting this anxiety no longer occur.” “… typically diagnosed symptoms of social anxiety (e.g., avoidance of social situations, low self - esteem) are all sensible anxieties to hold in order to avoid potential conflict situations; avoiding interactions eliminates the risk of upsetting others and having low self-esteem results in a default conflict-avoiding position of appeasing others. … These dreams propose a route out of social anxiety which focuses on becoming comfortable upsetting others for the benefit of the self, rather than disproving seemingly relevant maladaptive beliefs (e.g., people don’t like me).”